Peter Ware Higgs was born on 29 May 1929, in Newcastle upon Tyne. He went to school in Bristol and took inspiration from former student Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, to study physics. He gained a first-class honours BSc in physics at King’s College in London in 1950 and then an MSc 2 years later at the University of Edinburgh. He completed a PhD back at King’s College London in 1954. His thesis was titled: ‘Some problems in the theory of molecular vibrations’.
He is famous for proposing the idea of a field (the Higgs field) that spans the universe and gives particles the property of mass. The theory also predicts the existence of a new massive particle, the Higgs boson. Higgs described his ideas in two brief papers: ‘Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields’ and ‘Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons’, published in September and October 1964, with a further paper in 1966 describing the decay of the Higgs boson.
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